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Familiar words can serve as a semantic seed for syntactic bootstrapping
Author(s) -
Babineau Mireille,
Carvalho Alex,
Trueswell John,
Christophe Anne
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
developmental science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.801
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1467-7687
pISSN - 1363-755X
DOI - 10.1111/desc.13010
Subject(s) - bootstrapping (finance) , vocabulary , context (archaeology) , semantics (computer science) , psychology , word (group theory) , syntax , syntactic structure , linguistics , meaning (existential) , natural language processing , function (biology) , artificial intelligence , computer science , paleontology , philosophy , evolutionary biology , financial economics , economics , psychotherapist , biology , programming language
Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3‐ to 4‐year‐old children ( n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After watching a 5‐min training video in which a novel function word (i.e., ‘ko’) replaced either personal pronouns or articles, children were able to infer semantic properties for novel words co‐occurring with the newly learned function word (i.e., objects vs. actions). These findings implicate a mechanism by which a distributional analysis, associated with a small vocabulary of known words, could be sufficient to identify some properties associated with specific syntactic contexts.